I got woken up this morning by someone knocking at my window. HARD.
Or so I thought. It turns out that a piece of my aluminum fascia trim had come off the house and was hanging there, banging against my window in the wind.
“No problem, I’ll just fix it after work tomorrow.” I thought. EZ PZ.
But then I stopped and pondered for a minute.
I thought to myself, “Hmm … actually, how would I go about hiring someone else to fix this?”
And there’s a key lesson in that.
Now pay attention cuz this is important.
I immediately started having thoughts like, “Man, this is going to be a pain in the ass.”
“How do I know they’re going to do a good job?”
“What if they’re booked up for 2 months? I don’t want to wait.”
“What are they going to do if it comes off again in 2 weeks?
“What if they discover the fascia board is rotting? What’s their change order markup gonna be?”
… It spiraled pretty quickly and I actually got pretty anxious before I snapped back to reality, went outside, grabbed the piece of trim, pulled it off the house, and set it on the floor of my garage.
Now I know you’re thinking, “Okay Patrick, get to the point. What does this have to do with improving sales?”
No problem, listen up.
… The thing is, I have had this experience before.
I did this mental exercise last year when I needed some roofing work done on my other house.
… Except that time I actually did hire it out to someone else.
I called 7 companies, had 2 come out to look at the house, then hired my favorite (a family company run by two brothers and their cousin) to do the work.
I chose that company because all those questions that ran through my mind during the hiring process … they answered without me even having to ask.
They told me when they would be available to do the work.
They assured me it was an easy fix, and that they could get it done in 2 days, weather permitting.
They said if I had any issues down the line to call them and they would come by and address it at no charge.
Their sales process was dialed in and checked every single box.
The result was I felt extraordinarily comfortable working with them. I felt relief that they were looking out for me.
Now, the whole process of calling, vetting, and construction took about a week.
And during that time I wrote down every single question that crossed my mind, and when I originally thought of it. I wrote down each potential company’s answers, and how I felt when I received those answers. I wrote down the criteria by which I chose a company to do the work. And when the project was done, I sat down and looked at all of the data.
I took a whole day to break down my own company’s sales process at the time and see how well we were addressing those needs.
I found a lot of ways to improve our scripts, and shuffled around the timing of when we bring up our warranty and budget discussions.
And through that week-long process I learned more about what my customers wanted than in the entire previous year of closing contracts. (The improvements I made to my process are part of what led me to break the $1M barrier last year, a process I broke down in my private Facebook group.)
And once I started implementing the changes I got immediate feedback that this had been a damn great idea. The homeowners started looking a lot more at ease during their meetings with me, and our close rate jumped up almost 8% that month.
Swoosh! Nothing but net, baby.
So if you’ve never tried this exercise of hiring another contractor to work ON YOUR OWN HOUSE, I can’t recommend it enough. Going through this process from start to finish could very easily make you tens of thousands of dollars. It certainly did for me.
(P.S. – To see to my detailed sales process and download the exact scripts I use to close $150,000 contracts with ease, check out Markup & Marketing Mastery!)
